Residential choices and school choices are intimately connected in school systems where school admission relies on proximity rules. In countries with universal school choice systems, however, it remains an open question whether families’ residential mobility is tied to the choice of their children’s school, and with what consequences. Using administrative data on all children approaching primary-school age in Sweden, we study to what extent families’ financial and socio-economic background affects mobility between neighbourhoods and the characteristics of schools chosen by moving families. Our findings show that families do utilise the housing market as an instrument for school choice over the year preceding their firstborn child starting school. However, while families who move do ‘climb the social ladder’ by moving to neighbourhoods with more households of higher socio-economic status, their chosen schools do not appear to be of higher academic quality compared to those their children would otherwise have attended.

Research on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that context or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and sufficient to turn a school around. We use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of 77 Swedish schools studied over 12 years to answer this question. Our core finding is that there is no "silver bullet" solution. Instead, there are several distinct combinations of factors that can enable school turnaround. The local school context is essential for which combinations of factors are necessary and sufficient for school turnaround. We discuss implications for research on school improvement and education policy.

Research summary

Entrepreneurship research overlooks the dynamics of changing diversity in founding teams. Our simulations calibrated from existing studies suggest that founding teams that change diversity exhibit greater discounted performance for their ventures due to being less diverse and thus their ventures surviving longer, compared to teams that maintain their diversity. Moreover, discounted performance is higher for teams changing diversity due to other teams' performance than due to their own poor performance. Simulating without membership changes the interdependence between team diversity, venture performance, and team disruption, we find that while team diversity is overall performance-enhancing, this association differs across contexts and its impact varies as ventures mature. Founding team diversity should thus be seen as a continuum where moderate diversity can best serve teams in turbulent environments.

Managerial summary

We simulated the behavior of founding teams over time to show that compared to teams that do not change their diversity, those who do experience greater discounted performance for their business ventures. This improvement stems from the increased longevity, and thus greater accumulated performance, for teams that switch since they are more rather than less homogeneous. Our investigation also indicates that ventures led by teams that change diversity because they aspire to outperform other teams, tend to exhibit greater discounted performance than those that change diversity to outperform themselves. When we investigate the interconnectedness of teams' diversity, ventures' performance, and disruption, albeit without allowing for any changes in team diversity, we find that while diversity usually helps, teams moderately diversified tend to perform best in turbulent times.

When reasoning about causes of sustainability problems and possible solutions, sustainability scientists rely on disciplinary-based understanding of cause-effect relations. These disciplinary assumptions enable and constrain how causal knowledge is generated, yet they are rarely made explicit. In a multidisciplinary field like sustainability science, lack of understanding differences in causal reasoning impedes our ability to address complex sustainability problems. To support navigating the diversity of causal reasoning, we articulate when and how during a research process researchers engage in causal reasoning and discuss four common ideas about causation that direct it. This articulation provides guidance for researchers to make their own assumptions and choices transparent and to interpret other researchers' approaches. Understanding how causal claims are made and justified enables sustainability researchers to evaluate the diversity of causal claims, to build collaborations across disciplines, and to assess whether proposed solutions are suitable for a given problem.

We use full-population data to study trends in intergenerational absolute income mobility, measured as the ratio of children earning more than their parents, for 11 Swedish cohorts born 1972–1983. Absolute mobility during this period increases from 72% to 84% for men and from 76% to 86% for women—higher figures than in most other countries studied. To explain these results, we outline a novel decomposition strategy that accounts for cohort variation in parent-generation income inequality. All else equal, if income inequality is higher in the parent generation, more economic growth is required to achieve any given level of absolute mobility. We discuss implications for comparative research in intergenerational income mobility.

Purpose Economic integration of refugees remains a challenge for developed countries. Although refugees differ greatly from labor migrants in available resources and motivation toward self-employment, prevailing studies on minority and ethnic entrepreneurship tend to lump these different categories of migrants together. Based on theories of migrants economic embeddedness, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which family- and kinship-based resources affect self-employment duration among refugees and labor migrants. Design/methodology/approach Based on Cox regression models, this longitudinal study estimates the self-employment duration of 10,519 refugees and 2,503 labor migrants starting businesses in Sweden in the period 2006-2012. Findings Results reveal that while refugees are at a disadvantage to labor migrants in terms of self-employment duration, their higher level of family embeddedness in part helps them overcome these disadvantages. For refugees but not for labor migrants, co-location in an ethnic enclave also lowers the risk of them becoming unemployed after a spell in entrepreneurship. Originality/value This original paper provides empirical and theoretical contributions to research on migrants self-employment success. It also discusses contributions for research on entrepreneurs social embeddedness and refugees entrepreneurship.

We bridge research on work environment and competition among schools using detailed data on complaints and incidents of disorder and violence in all Swedish schools 1999-2011. Findings suggest that competition is associated with lower levels of complaints across educational levels. For lower secondary schools, municipalities with high levels of school competition experience higher levels of violence in schools. To assess the causal effects of competition on work environment, we compare municipalities that have introduced competition with those that have not in a difference–in–difference framework, finding that only school complaints in upper secondary schools decrease after competition is introduced.

This chapter present a research project dedicated to better understand how new venture teams work together to achieve desired outcomes. Teams, as opposed to an individual, start a majority of all innovative new ventures. Yet, little research or theory exists in new venture settings about how members interact with each other over time—teamwork—to produce innovative technologies, products, and services. We believe a systematic study of social and psychological processes that underlie new venture teamwork and venture outcomes is timely and important. Unique features of our research project include: (1) a team level focus on social and psychological processes, to assess relations to proximal (e.g., innovation, first sales and team satisfaction), and distal value creation outcomes (e.g., sales growth, raised capital and profits); (2) Combined qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to provide both theory building and theory testing for the relations of interest; and (3) A time-sequential design with data collection every three months over one year to allow us to investigate the relations of interest for new ventures.

Research on incubators show that size is important in achieving efficiency and networking benefits for clients. However, little research has focused on what factors influence incubator size. We theorize and show partial support for size benefits to incubator specialization. Analyses of the relationship between size and four distinct specialization strategies in a sample of 96 European incubators show that incubator size is positively related to a strategic focus on universities and research institutes as recruitment channels and to a focus on sustainability, but unrelated to industry focus. Incubator size was found to be negatively related to a regional focus. While sustainability focused incubators tended to not find recruitment challenging, paradoxically, among those who did, the most frequently reported challenges were related to finding tenants that focus on sustainability. Post-hoc analyses revealed that tenants with a focus other than sustainability often dominate sustainability-oriented incubators, suggesting that sustainability may be more of a legitimating strategy than an explicit selection criterion.